In April 1865, General Sherman marched with Yankee troops down Hillsboro (now Hillsborough) Street, but he had almost decided to march up Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. He would regret this decision for the rest of his life.

If you go up into the rotunda of the Capitol, you can see what is written on the stone tablet in the hands of Canova’s statue of George Washington: “Plans for the Penal Colonnye of Carrye, North Carolina.”

When delegates met at Isaac Hunter’s Tavern to decide the location of the new state capital, Toast, Stem, Lizard Lick, Climax, Weed and Mamers became the first recorded official joke nominations in North Carolina history.

The Capitol Building was originally designed as the tomb for Governor Montfort Stokes’s wife. When it was discovered that the architect had built it using the wrong scale, it was decided the building would be better employed as a legislative meeting place.